The puzzle of indirect speech

Abstract

I discuss two recent articles (Pinker, Steven, Nowak, Martin, Lee, James, 2008. The logic of indirect speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (3), 833–838, and Lee, James, Pinker, Steven, 2010. Rationales for indirect speech: the theory of the strategic speaker. Psychological Review 117 (3), 785–807), in which the authors dissociate off-record indirect speech from politeness and propose an alternative explanation for it in terms of payoffs for the speaker and the listener, and the digital nature of language interpretation. I suggest that, contrary to their claims, on closer scrutiny, the authors’ examples still rely on a narrower sense of locutionary cooperation, and that their discussion of uses of indirect speech when deniability is not required could be expanded by taking into account instances of off-record indirectness between intimates or members of different social groups, where indirect speech may serve to underline the interlocutors’ common ground and/or to construct the speaker's identity. Finally, I propose that a multi-component theory of indirect speech may offer a more productive way of accounting for off-record indirectness as the outcome of several different, sometimes opposing, motivations.